


Basketball girl

by bob2ff



Series: Satsuki and Dai-chan vs. the World [2]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Gen, Male-Female Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 05:01:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1332937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bob2ff/pseuds/bob2ff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Basketball helps Momoi make sense of life.</p><p>Written for bps Challenge 62: Girls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Basketball girl

The first time Aomine and Momoi had fought, it had been over basketball.

They were 9. Dai-chan had insisted that dunking was the one move every basketball player had to learn, or else they couldn’t call themselves one. Satsuki, armed with the research of a year’s subscription of basketball magazines, had loftily thrown statistics on scoring percentiles and other such numbers in his face until Dai-chan just yelled “Well, dunking’s just better!”

It went on like that until she refused to talk to him. She ignored him studiously (teachers had commented on her wondrous attention span those few days) while he tried to pretend nothing had happened the next day. Eventually he got frustrated and yelled “fine, if you won’t talk to me I won’t talk to you either!”

Dai-chan hadn’t lasted 2 days. He rang the doorbell of her house repeatedly while her mum resignedly opened it, and crouched outside her door chanting “Satsuki, Satsuki, Satsuki…” until her silent treatment was defeated by his sheer force of annoyance.

Even as a little girl, Satsuki had great presence of mind. Teachers sat her next to Dai-chan because she could handle him better than they could. Her mother got praises of Satsuki’s maturity and deft handling of the social dynamics of elementary school.

When she was 12 it all changed. The year before Aomine and her went to Teikou, she blossomed into a girl that threatened the social standing of other girls. She became too beautiful to be relatable. The more boys paid attention to her, the more girls ignored her overtures of friendship.

Satsuki was confused. She could understand boys — by virtue of having spent almost all her life with Dai-chan, boys were simple to her. They were predictable — she knew just what to say to get them to do what she wanted. A well-placed hand on the shoulder, a sweet smile, and they would help the girls with their cleaning duty.

The girls didn’t like that, though. They whispered behind their hands and called her names.

Aomine thought basketball solved all problems. The first time she cried to him about it, he brought her to the courts and showed her his dunking practice. It had been the best laugh she had of her life, watching the epic fail of Dai-chan jumping to dunk and missing the net completely. Aomine had been so proud of himself for making her feel better that he even laughed with her about it (“I’ll get it eventually, though,” he insisted. In only the next year, in Teikou’s first string, he launched the dunk that wowed Kise into joining).

He was right, basketball did help Satsuki feel better when she needed to see that things were simple again. But the next day, the girls ignored her again, and she was again struck by how complicated everything was, how most of life could not be organized into the lines of data she studiously compiled. How not everything could be settled by the smooth arc of a ball being netted or the hard thunks of a dribble.

When she got to Teikou, Satsuki decided to throw herself into basketball. It was what she got, and what she understood.

She was brilliant at it, as being manager, as being scout, as being Dai-chan’s own shadow in ways that Tetsu-kun couldn’t be. She felt fully that basketball was how she made sense of life.

It was by the end of Teikou’s third championship and the domination of the Generation of Miracles were complete, Satsuki felt basketball had betrayed her. It had warped the only thing she could count on as a constant, Dai-chan’s enduring love for the game.

All she did was continue. Because it was the only way she could use to make sense of the world.    



End file.
